(To skip right to my review of “Think U Da Shit (Fart)”, scroll down to “Think U Da Shit (Fart)”, A Review
Some Background Before The Review of “Think U Da Shit (Fart)” By Ice Spice
If you read my article on the shuttering of Pitchfork, you’ll know how much that brand meant to me, and how you wouldn’t be reading this if not for them. Sure, it was pretty much always a million dollar enterprise, and worshipping at the feet of something like that is unsustainable, and I recognize that now. It still hit pretty hard when it spiraled and crashed. A pillar that held up my drive crumbled. Never will I be able to write for them, or get a review of my art done by them. That dream is over, the window has closed. A part of me feels like the mission failed.
The reverberating effect is that the greater music landscape is looking awfully bleak to me. Blogs weren’t just ancient artifacts that existed to give you something new to listen to, they made certain people’s careers. They created culture. I’m thinking of people like Tyler, The Creator, fka Twigs and Lana Del Rey, just to name a few. Without music publications scouting and covering these people, and without a new, dedicated audience to be there for it, all we get is whatever the Spotify and Apple Music algorithms want to hand over to us. And the worst part is, we can’t fight that. When I was four years old, I remember swimming in the ocean, punching the waves over and over again, hoping that this would stop them. But they just got bigger and bigger, and people all over the beach enjoyed the waves. And I looked like a little psycho on the beach, punching at water.
This is what this new age of music discovery feels like. It’s the same artists I loved, Tyler, The Creator, fka Twigs, and Lana Del Rey, etc. dropping great new shit. And then whatever new people are just copying their blueprints and are able to make a soundbite go viral end up succeeding, with few exceptions. People like familiarity and passive listening. The people that give into the predetermined waves from these massive trends and currents succeed or look cringe for trying, or both. The little psychos that punch against the waves all the time, just look burnt out to everyone else around them.
What I’ve learned after trying many formats and tactics over the past few years is that whether you ride the waves or rage aggressively against them, you’re still beholden to them. Memes and raged out reactions are a mirror reflection of our culture, one that I and many other people see as lacking in substance. It’s boring, cynical and unimaginative, and there will always be younger people that will do it better than me. So what exactly am I to do, when I feel like we have reached peak emptiness? Well, I don’t really know, to be honest. However, there is a strange calm before the storm that I am slowly beginning to navigate my way towards, let me explain.
The current collapse of music blogs and curative spaces for music in general is a fresh start that we need to recognize and seize, now. Without “Best New Music” and caring about grades from these publications, artists can feel more free to stop catering to the rubric, and purely make what they want to make. What we’re left with is the nonstop take economy, now unregulated as print and popular media is beginning to take a dark nosedive. Is a song good or bad? The answer to that question is more subjective than ever. And as someone with strong opinions, I am going to continue to try to do a difficult dance between helping new artists find an audience without doing PR for them.
Overall, I am going to try to focus just a little less on this culture war nonsense, and try to elevate people that deserve it. I’m not sure exactly which form this will take, but stay tuned.
“Think U Da Shit (Fart)” by Ice Spice, A Review
This song is a perfect time capsule of our current era. Here is a singular, front-facing pop star, rapper artist who you didn’t know a year and a half ago. She is probably the biggest rising artist of our time, and it’s all due to good marketing and hits catered directly to the algorithm. Even though I want to frown upon it, it’s making me dance and sing along. Ice Spice is not here to reinvent the wheel, and as she says on the song, she’s not stopping. “Bitches be quick but I’m quicker…I got my foot on they necks I can’t let up”. And why would she? She’s working it.
Trying to give this an honest review made me feel like Stan in that “You’re Getting Old” episode of South Park. As Stan gets older, all the new music and culture he used to love begins to sound like literal shit to him, like actual farting and pooping noises.
Maybe I’m being gaslit, maybe this song is a figment of my imagination like in this episode, but I’m pretty sure the hottest new song is called “Fart”. I don’t know what to with that information. All I know is that artists like Ice Spice and her hit song “Fart” are not going anywhere. Ironically in the video, she is at the beach, in the ocean. She’s ripping through waves on a jet ski, twerking and farting all over the haters. She leaned into her fifteen minutes of “Munch” fame so hard that she has become the iconic artist of the moment, and good for her. I wish her well. I hope, if anything, this song allows women to finally fart, for the first time in recorded human history.
Nothing much else to say, this song is silly and fun. But it has led me down a revelatory path that is making me slowly and steadily start to exit the culture war. Maybe. This song, which is one letter off from being called “Farts”, also has pushed me to the edge of my patience.
More to come. Stay tuned. Hold in your fart until I come back. I’m the group leader.